Love and Sex With Robots: the Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships
David Levy Duckworth, 320pp, £12.99
David Levy's thesis, in this utterly fascinating, scholarly and rather uncomfortable book, is essentially that we'll fuck anything (which we knew), and that we love pretty much anything that looks as though it might love us; or, at least, is blank and malleable enough for us to project that idea upon. Levy proposes that, by 2025 or so, apparently responsive artificial partners will be available for roughly $20,000; and that we will find ourselves not only humping, but actually loving them. There are two questions he raises, in essence: Is it love just because it feels like love? And is there a difference between a response immaculately simulated by a robot, and a "real" human response?
People have been having sex with machines from ancient times (if you count ivory dildos and the like) and industrial lust-slakers have been around since the Victorians. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was a curious fascination with "vibrotherapy" - some machines being driven by steam and requiring a boilerman in the next room - every bit as coy and unpersuasive as the adverts for vibrators in the 1970s, which showed, on the box, a woman holding the thing to her cheek, caught in a sigh of relief. Who would have thought so many nice girls suffered from trigeminal neuralgia?
Top of the range for women now is a thing called the Sybian, a sort of leatherette saddle with a variety of attachments - twizzler, nodule, wang, double choad, whatever - twirling, vibrating and chugging atop it, driven by machinery beneath. It's supposed to be just the ticket, yet anthropomorphic it is not. But women have always been less given to self-deception. The male equivalent is anthropomorphic in spades. The Real Doll is an eight-stone, $10,000, silicone-and-latex popsy with a steel skeleton, removable tongue and a hook in the back of the neck. Dress them up, strip 'em off again and Bob's your auntie.
But there is far more to it than that, and the evidence is out there. In his extraordinary TV documentary Guys and Dolls (2007), Nick Holt follows four Real Doll owners. One, Gordon from Texas, is clearly deranged. He "can bond with inanimate objects" but won't dress his doll in "thongs" or "weird stuff that makes a woman look like she's been had by like a hundred guys". Sex with his doll gives him "peace of mind".
Michael from California has eight of them. "If there's anything you spend money on with these dolls, it's the wigs. More realism . . . means better sex." He invites his new girlfriend to his birthday party: him, her and eight Real Dolls, with improbable breasts and boyish hips. She dumps him. The ironically named Everard, from Dor set, 50, works in computers and bares his soul. "I had a very pleasant morning in bed with Virginia. I think she's sleeping it off now." He's wearing a hang-gliding T-shirt. Peeks into the bedroom. "Yeah, she's still asleep. And that's, of course, her sleeping face. That's one thing I had to do - to change her face from the eyes-open to the eyes-closed face." The eyes-open face lies on the dressing table, sagging. Perhaps it should be in a jar by the door: Polymer Rigby.
Everard takes pictures of himself with his dolls, one seated and the other (chained by her hook to a drainpipe outside his suburban semi) "looking" over "her" shoulder, Everard beside them. He looks at these "family photos" on his computer. A man gazing at a screen on which is an image of himself pretending to look at a piece of steel and silicone pretending to be a woman pretending to look at another pretend woman pretending to read. Self-delusion doesn't get much more intricate. Everard knows it, too, but can't quite figure it out. He goes hang-gliding but doesn't understand why women aren't impressed.
And Davecat, a curiously beautiful but odd young man, lives with his father, who is against Shu-Chan because Shu-Chan is a doll. Davecat proves Levy's thesis: he loves Shu-Chan. He recalls when he was little, going to a store with his mum and being found talking to a mannequin in a tennis skirt, a sign of "my early interest in synthetic humans". Shu-Chan has to go for repair. ("I'm running out of vaginas," says the repair-man.) "There's an obvious sadness going on because we'll be missing each other," says Davecat, heaving Shu-Chan down the stairs. He kisses her in her crate and murmurs "I love you". You can't doubt it is love. "When she first came into my life it was just sex, sex, sex, but now it's tapered off and we're, we're there for each other, we're just there for each other," he says.
Yet is it love in the sense that love for a real woman would be love? The ancient Greeks would have had a fine time. Eros? Philia? Storge? Agape? Or is it simply self-delusion, like all love is self-delusion, an evolutionarily advantageous affective disorder, designed to stimulate bonding and repeated sex, and consequently good for the species?
Perhaps it is only now emerging because we have the technology. Until recently there have only been other human beings to fall for, or maybe the occasional sheep. (Or, if you're English, dogs.) Levy tells of Japanese sex dolls that moan when you touch them. (We have all been out with people like that.) Some, more expensive, scream. The Japanese are sui generis, really. But is the talking, feedback-giving, affective-mimetic doll any different from a dog? A dog doesn't necessarily feel love for us, but we look at it and we think, "If I were a dog, I'd behave like that to show love," and that's all we need. More than we need; as Levy points out, people used to grieve if their Tamagotchis "died". One man disembarked from an aeroplane before take-off because he was told to switch his off.
We are on a hair trigger for love, and (unless our affections are otherwise engaged) we will love back anything that appears to love us. Love is not something to do with them; it is something to do with us. Which is perhaps why it feels so odd to watch other people being, as it would appear, fooled. The embarrassment of the viewer watching Davecat loving Shu-Chan is close to the embarrassment felt by atheists watching people love a dead Palestinian or a Bronze Age sky-ghost. In both cases, it is tinged with sympathy, maybe even empathy.
It will come. Levy, an award-winning pioneer in artificial intelligence and president of the International Computer Games Association, is right. What the religious will do - what the law will do, when it is still illegal to sell vibrators in Tennessee, and God help us when the Taliban find out - is another matter. But virtuality is going both ways. We're going into the screen (think of Second Life) and now the screen is coming out to us. Still, as Mrs Patrick Campbell might have said, it doesn't matter as long as we don't do it in the street and frighten the robots.
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